Access Intuition For Smarter Investing

Turn “Aha!” Moments Into Smarter Investing

3- Be aware of your ego

To protect ourselves, we have an egoic mind, or the ego. When used correctly, the ego allows us to separate ourselves from the world around us, thus protecting our sensitive intuitive senses.

An example of a potentially healthy ego would be when you hear about a shocking news story that might affect your investments, and you shut down your emotions and begin to intellectualize what is happening.

Unfortunately, most people do not operate their egos with consciousness so they live partially disconnected from their worlds and the intuitive sensations it provides. So when real estate markets were clearly overvalued in 2008, many of us rationalized outrageous house prices as reasonable and continued to invest in the stock market even though it was also clearly overvalued.

To better access our intuition for smarter investing, we need to be able to track the course of our emotional responses to things, people and situations. Are we anxious? Are we rationalizing? Are we riding a wave of euphoria? Consciousness of our egos allows us to separate our signal from noise, emotion from intuition and truth from fiction.

4- Set proper expectations

One gigantic obstacle to accessing intuition at will is having too much expectation about the outcome of the intuitive process. In the aforementioned example, this would relate to wanting to buy Apple or Google because we like them.

It is OK to have a goal for our intuitive process, such as trying to answer the question, “Should I work with this financial adviser?” What is not OK is expecting a particular outcome.

As you engage in an intuitive process, make sure that you are approaching it without expectation of an outcome. Be open to any possibility and see if you can’t let magic happen.

Maybe that financial adviser has had a rough couple of years, and normally you would fire him, but maybe your intuitive sense is that the recent past has taught him how to be better at managing your money. If so, this is an important insight that you might otherwise overlook if you have an expectation about the outcome of your intuitive process.

5- Translate insights into words

Intuition flashes happen when the left side of the brain is either occupied or turned off entirely. The freedom this state provides allows for pure-feeling sensations to enter our minds.

How can we make use of intuitive insights unless we know how to translate our feeling sensations, which can be amorphous, into something we can think about, like a number or words?

For example, you might have a bad feeling about the direction of the stock market, but you need to translate your feeling about it into the number of months before it is OK to invest again for your insight to be useful.

Alternatively, maybe you have a sense of unease when thinking about buying stock in Apple or Google. Is that unease due to those stocks being overvalued? Is it due to people being less interested in high-tech products? You have to be able to know what your feeling means if you want to think about it.

For our intuition to be more potent, we need to be able to translate our intuitive flashes into something we can think about. To start, try setting aside time each day to really focus on how you describe things, people and, especially, sensations.

A great practice is to learn to translate feelings into words, the way a music, food or wine critic does when describing things that can challenge an easy explanation. The skill of translating your feeling of “hints of cherry” in your favorite red wine can become “Steve Jobs’ cancer is negatively affecting Apple’s morale.”

The more practice you have at translating sensations into words (or, much more rarely, numbers), the more effective your intuitive insights will be.